2017 PS Film Festival

Fifteen years after her father killed himself, Petra Epperlein returns to her hometown in former East Germany to investigate his links with the Stasi and how the apparatus of state control maintained Communist rule. This boldly stylized film is a potent reminder of how the politics is always, ultimately, personal.

Schedule

film synopsis

If you filed the 41 million index cards the East German secret police, the Stasi, maintained on its citizens during the Cold War side by side, you would need a shelf running all the way from Palm Springs to Disneyland. One of those cards pertained to filmmaker Petra Epperlein's father. But had he also informed on his fellow citizens? According to anonymous letters after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, he was an undercover Stasi agent. At the time the family dismissed the accusations. But in 1999, years after Petra had moved to the West, her father hanged himself.

Drawn back to her hometown, Chemnitz (aka "Karl Marx Stadt"), Epperlein and her husband/filmmaking partner Michael Tucker investigate her father's Communist past, his association with the Stasi, and the entire Orwellian apparatus of state control which defined East Germany for more than 40 years.

Shot in black and white to evoke the Cold War paranoia of 1950s' spy thrillers and narrated by the filmmakers' daughter Matilda, this boldly stylish film is a potent reminder that politics is personal, and the personal is always political.